The present invention relates to a radio paging receiver having a display function and, more particularly, to the improvement of the display function.
A radio paging receiver receives not only subscriber or address codes but also messages, stores the messages received and displays them on its display unit by read-out operation. Examples of this kind of receiver include the paging receiver disclosed in the UK Patent Application No. 2,061,582 by M. Masaki, assigned to the present applicant. In this receiver, upon receipt of a new message during the display of an earlier received message, the displayed message is replaced by the new one. Therefore the earlier message may be lost before the subscriber can record or dial this earlier message.
Also known is a receiver which memorizes a plurality of messages and subsequently confirms the content to be read-out in response to the depression of a push-switch or switches. If messages are received by such a receiver beyond the capacity of its message storage means, some of the messages may be erased before the bearer of the receiver confirms all the received messages.
There further are receivers, like the one disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,249,165 issued on Feb. 3, 1981, which has a memory mode but does not have an alert tone, to alert the subscriber that a paging signal is being received and the paging message is being stored. In its memory mode, this kind of receiver cannot inform the subscriber whether or not a paging signal is being received.